Startup Mentor & Product Strategist

Ankur Shrivastava

Test Your Startup Idea Before You Build

StratMate

Strategy Consultant | Product Manager | Founder @ StratMate

Learn how to test your idea quickly using interviews and outreach, without building a product or wasting time.

Validate Your Startup Idea Without Building a Product

Identify real demand by spotting signals like willingness to pay, urgency, and consistent problem patterns.

Identify Real Customer Demand

Walk away with a clear 48-hour plan to validate your idea, including actions, outreach, and how to interpret results.

Run a 48-Hour Validation Plan You Can Execute Immediately

Talk to customers. Test assumptions. Build with conviction.

Fractional CPO | x-Oracle, Autodesk

Oracle

Autodesk

Stanford University

National Peace Corps Association

Arup

Moiz Kapadia

Fractional Head of Product | ex-Oracle, Autodesk, Stanford alum

Cohort 4

Cohort 5

Most PMs are stuck shipping a roadmap they don't own. It's reactive, based on Sales or Engineering requests, rather than proactive based on customer needs.You can't build the product that defines your career if you don't own the roadmap.The PMs who shipped great products didn't do it by magic.They ran customer discovery sprints to build their case, de-risked the product and launched with conviction.There are many great books on customer discovery out there.But reading about it isn't enough. You need a repeatable process that you can practice, tailor and make it your own. This course teaches you a structured, AI-Powered Discovery process using Claude — applied to whatever you're building right now.Over 3 weeks of live lessons + ongoing office hours:Learn discovery fundamentals and set up your Claude Skills workflowRun a sprint to interview customers about your product idea, using your Agent.Finally, we'll make sense of your interviews together. By the end you'll know: Build or Pivot?

Bring your product idea. In 3 weeks, you'll know if it belongs on your roadmap.

Master Fundamental Discovery Skills

Build Claude Skills to run discovery end to end

Present your roadmap to your leadership with conviction

You will be interviewing Customers in the course. This is a critical skill in Discovery, not to be outsourced to AI.

Must be able to schedule at least 1 Customer Conversation

Product Managers at a company without a structured discovery practice

Founders who need validation before investing time and money in product development.

UX Researchers who are overloaded with discovery work and are looking for a system to speed up their workflows

AI lets you build fast  >>> The real risk is building the wrong thing.

15+ years Product&Marketing, 100+ MVPs 

Miro

LEGO®

Microsoft

Elena Avramenko

15+ yrs in Product & Marketing, award-winning founder, 100+ new product launches

Vibe-coding tools like Lovable and Claude let you go immediately from idea to prototype. What used to take weeks now takes hours. That sounds like an advantage — but it's created a new problem: vibewasting - building fast without clarity or a plan.Building the wrong thing faster just gets you to the wrong place sooner😉.Most vibe-coders skip the one step that determines whether any of it is worth it: validation. They start building the moment they have an idea — before they've talked to a single customer, before they know if the pain is real, before they know if anyone would pay.This workshop fixes that. In 2 hours you'll build a clear plan for the next 14 days — giving you much more confidence in your idea and helping you justify further investment of time and money. We'll start by writing a sharp bet on your idea, define exactly who your first customer is, and design interview questions that surface real pain. You'll also create a Lovable prompt that specs the tiniest version worth building - something you can vibe-code in an hour and put in front of real people to validate. You leave with a 14-day validation plan, ready to test before you invest weeks building the wrong thing.

A first-time founder or side-project builder with a business idea who wants to test it before spending weeks vibe-coding the wrong thing.

A vibe-coder who has already built something that didn't get traction and wants a structured approach before starting their next idea.

A professional or domain expert who spotted a problem in their industry and wants to validate it as a business before learning to build.

This is a hands-on transformation blueprint. In just 4 weeks, you'll go from "hoping it works" to "knowing it will work"

Chief Product Manager and Co-Founder

JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Market Axess

Goldman Sachs

Software AG

Anil Jaising

Anil Jaising helps product leaders thrive by unpacking innovation 

Principal Product Consultant

TiVo

Persistent Systems

Bernie Maloney

From breakdowns, through breakthroughs, to $1B and beyond

Cohort Based Course

Cohort 2

You've watched engineering spend months building something that flopped at launch. You've sat in prioritization meetings arguing about which bet to make, with nothing but opinions and gut feel.There's a better way.This course gives you a systematic method to validate product ideas before you ask engineering for a single sprint. Using AI-powered prototyping, structured experimentation, and real market testing, you'll learn to separate winning ideas from expensive mistakes in weeks or days rather than quarters.By the end of this 4-week course, you'll have validated (or invalidated) a real product concept using techniques you can repeat on every initiative you touch.<h2>THE PROBLEM THIS COURSE SOLVES</h2>Product leaders face a credibility gap:• Competitors ship faster because they've figured out how to test before they build• Your roadmap is built on assumptions, but stakeholders expect certainty• Engineering capacity is scarce, and you can't afford to waste sprints on unvalidated ideas• AI tools exist that could accelerate validation, but you're not using them systematicallyMost PM courses teach you frameworks for thinking. This one teaches you a system for proving.

The systematic approach to validating product bets before engineering commits. 


Map and Prioritize Your Riskiest Assumptions

Prototype Without Engineering Using AI and Vibe Coding

Design Experiments That Generate Evidence, Not Opinions

Create Offers That Convert Interest to Commitment

Folks who are early career, or are meaningfully involved in content creation should not enroll

This course is NOT FOR everyone

It is almost certainly the most advanced product validation course, suited for PMs, Design, Eng, Data, etc 

This IS NOT a beginner level course

It IS NOT for folks who like to outsource their thinking to others and just follow directions or Anyone looking for theoretical frameworks 

It is FOR YOU if you like think for yourself and WANT to WIN

Product Focused Startup founders and Corporate Product Managers frustrated by the gap between their products's potential and current result

Product Directors accountable for portfolio-level outcomes, need to de-risk multiple bets and adopt validation as a standard practice

Product Managers Building new products or major pivots to prove product-market fit signals before scaling investment in high risk assumption

Learn how to build, launch, and sell real products so you can move from designer to confident product builder.

Build products you're proud to launch

Apple

Amazon

LinkedIn

GitHub

Nima Tahami

Product Designer (15 years), Instructor (18K+ students), Solo-building @Mokline

Cohort 1

Cohort 3

Most designers can create polished screens. Few know how to turn them into real products people actually use and pay for.If your ideas are stuck in Figma, the problem isn’t talent; it’s knowing what to build, how much to build, and how to launch.In this 3-week sprint, you will:• Build a working MVP• Launch a conversion-focused landing page• Put your product in front of real users at a real price• Use modern tools, including AI, to move fast and stay focusedThis is not a coding bootcamp. It’s a hands-on launch experience where you practice real product decisions, ship imperfect work, and learn from real-world feedback.The bar for designers has changed. Designers who can ship, launch, and sell have the advantage. If you’re ready to stop waiting and start shipping, this course is for you.

Build, ship, and launch your own product during this 3-week cohort

Build and launch a real MVP with a clear path to your first sale

Choose the right product idea with confidence

Think and act like a product builder, not just a designer

Create a landing page that clearly sells your product

Put your product in front of real users and ask for money

Experienced designers who want to turn product ideas into a real MVP and prove they can ship and sell beyond client or team work.

Designers curious about entrepreneurship who want a low-risk, practical way to launch a first product without quitting their job.

Product-minded creatives who work close to products but want end-to-end ownership and leverage beyond hourly or salaried work.

Agentic AI

Coding with AI

AI Workflows

Claude Code

OpenClaw

Vibe Coding

AI Evals

AI Transformation

RAG & Search

AI for PMs

AI for Engineers

AI for Designers

AI for Marketers

AI for Founders

Product Sense

Product Discovery

User Research

Prototyping

Growth

Analytics

Tech Foundations

Strategy

Influence

Leadership

Career Growth

Machine Learning

LLM Ops

Context Eng

Security

System Design

Figma

Design Systems

Visual Design

Design Strategy

Automation

Content Marketing

Demand Gen

Go-to-Market

Product Marketing

Positioning

Social Media

Brand

B2B Marketing

SEO & AEO

AI for Leaders

AI Governance

Communication

Management

People Operations

Exec Presence

Storytelling

Goal-setting

Personal Brand

Fundraising

Everyone

Operators

Data Scientists

Business Analysts

User Researchers

Customer Success

Project Managers

HR Professionals

Sales People

Lawyers

Finance

Investors

Real Estate

Educators

Creators

Startup founders building new businesses, from MVP to scale.

Identifying opportunities and validating what to build through customer research, experimentation, and prioritization.

Finding and validating product-market fit — identifying underserved markets, testing hypotheses, and iterating to fit.

Test Your Startup Idea Before You Build

What you'll learn

Why this topic matters

You'll learn from

Ankur Shrivastava